Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Proposal: Prenominal Adjectives in Japanese

在理查德·K·拉尔森博士的指导下，山户广子将为她的博士论文收集数据。她的研究涉及日语中的方言变异，重点是形容词的屈折变化。她将研究从日本北部到南部的七个县的方言变体，包括北海道、福岛(或新泻)、大阪、京都、广岛、福冈和鹿儿岛。该项目的核心数据将通过与以英语为母语的人进行口头访谈来收集，将就涉及形容词的例句和短语的可接受性和含义范围咨询他们。这些形容词包括那些在英语中表现出和蔼可亲的形容词，如“old-Friend”(可以表示‘老朋友’或‘老朋友’)，以及上下文中的形容词，如结果状语(“Mary‘t the Metals Flat”)、致使句(“Mary Make John Happy”)、状语(“Mary讲得很快”)，以及所谓的第二谓词结构(“Mary at the Fish raw”)。Yamakido女士还将查阅只能在相关地区获得的出版资料，以及几位日本方言专家。她的田野调查结果将影响到日语中形容词前名的性质：它们是投射到定语结构(如“蓝房子”)还是投射到关系从句(如“房子是蓝的”)。这一研究对生成句法和语义学理论，特别是对日语方言学都具有重要意义。它不仅将增进对日语语法及其形态和句法形式之间关系的理解；它还将展示日语语法在一小部分中的丰富多样性和跨方言比较的重要性。

Under the direction of Dr. Richard K. Larson, Ms. Hiroko Yamakido will collect data for her doctoral dissertation. Her research concerns dialect variation in Japanese, with focus on adjectival inflection. She will study the variants spoken in seven prefectures that extend from northern to southern Japan, including Hokkaido, Fukushima (or Niigata), Osaka, Kyoto, Hiroshima, Fukuoka, and Kagoshima. The project's core data will be gathered though oral interviews with native speakers, who will be consulted regarding the acceptability and range of meanings of example sentences and phrases involving adjectives. The adjectives include those showing the amibuity in English examples like "OLD friend" (which can mean 'aged friend' or 'long-time friend'), as well as adjectives found in contexts like resultatives ("Mary hammered the metal FLAT"), causatives ("Mary made John HAPPY"), adverbials ("Mary spoke QUICK-ly"), and so-called secondary predicate constructions ("Mary ate the fish RAW"). Ms. Yamakido will also consult published sources available only in the relevant locales and several Japanese dialectologists. The results of her fieldwork will bear on the nature of prenominal adjectives in Japanese: whether they are projected into attributive structures (like "blue house") or into relative clause structures (like "house that is blue").This research is significant both for theories of generative syntax and semantics generally, and for Japanese dialectology in particular. It will not only advance understanding of Japanese grammar, and the relation between its morphological and syntactic forms; it will also demonstrate the rich diversity within a small sector of the grammar and the importance of cross-dialectal comparison.